Film Night: Nosferatu (1922)

January 25 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

One of the most eerie, foreboding and influential horror films in the history of cinema, Nosferatu wasn’t quite the first vampire film, but it was the first adaptation of Dracula (albiet an unofficial one) and established the conventions of succeeding vampire pictures: the thirst for blood, the power of sunlight to destroy the creature and vampirism as a metaphor for sexuality, contagion and xenophobia.

The peculiar Dracula character here is a repellent walking corpse with bald head, pointy teeth and very long fingernails and represents the polar opposite of the suave count typified by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee.

Nosferatu’s main plot innovation is the plague theme as the vampire character makes the satanic decision to spread his malaise into the rational, scientific Europe of the 19th century by bringing hordes of disease carrying rats to infect an ill-fated town.

Bram Stoker’s estate ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed. Luckily this was never achieved as without this seminal film the vampire genre that’s found success in every medium, might never have taken off.